Thursday, November 20, 2008

Folks, I've got a ton of ideas to take Creative Chaos. I've been spending more and more time lately involved in discussions of KanBan - which is an evolving method that is slowly competing with Scrum.

I could write about the aspects of software quality that are hard to define requirements for - scalability, performance, reliability, usability - and what to do about it.

I could put more meat on the bones of "when should a test be automated?" (or "run unattended?")

I could talk about the business of software development, negotiating for nerds, or the dynamics of maintenance and legacy software.

Or I could just post more stories from my youth as a military cadet.

I'm probably most interested in exploring the idea of uncertainty. After all, we can't predict the future - yet we have these things called project plans with dates and deadlines and deliverables.

Those are just some of my the ideas bouncing around in my head. Still, at this point, after three years of evolution, you - the audience of Creative Chaos, might know better than me what to do next, because you know what appeals to you and why.

I covet your feedback, and promise to respond and take it seriously.

And, if you've ever just wanted a chance to heckle ... now's you chance.

Please consider leaving a comment for this post; it's your chance to steer the ship.

11 comments:

Matt, I'd like to see you talk more about 'non-functional' types of testing such as security and scalability, just because I personally need to learn a lot in that area. I'm also very interested in learning more about kanban. Of course any of the subjects you mention will be interesting, but since you ask, that is my preference!

Please write about whatever it is that you have insight about, that the average person in the field does not. That way you become a valuable resource, not just another blogger getting lost in the crowd.

By the way, I would be interested in learning more about decision making under uncertainty.

Lisa - I was actually putting together a tutorial on attributes of software quality ("non-functional requirements") - but the voices that matter conference has been postponed. I could continue to evolve the ideas on the site. Thank you for the encouragement, RLGLasel.

I'll probably do a couple of short posts on a couple of topics, and see where energy appears, then continue to post on that. Hopefully, we'll get a few more comments first!

So my overall thought is to try a find the water strategy - I'll post on uncertainty, quality attributes, and the ROI of test automation (thank you Ankur) and see what I have energy for an how people leave comments. (FWIW, comments help give me energy. Without feedback, it can feel like I'm talkign to myself ...)

"when should a test be automated?" (or "run unattended?") - hopefully you see that these are two very different concepts... Patricia Legaspi has been posting about partial automation on the Google Testing blog (Nov 4th)- what I used to call 'semi-auto' testing.Hoping you also took the time to 'smell the roses' this T-giving- cheers- Mike Tierney

Mike - of course those are different phrases. I hope to use such phrases to break us out of the either/or thinking about automation into many possibilities. (Such as SlideShow etc). That could be a really interesting couple blog posts, fwiw.